Stinkin' Thinkin' Lincoln! Voted to Waste $2.5 Billion . . .
. . . on 10 C17 Which the Air Force, the Pentagon and even President Obama didn't want!
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| What Did She Get? |
ICYMI: last year on October 17, 2009, Sen Blanche Lincoln joined her incumbent cronies "to spend $2.5 billion on 10 new airplanes [Boeing C-17 Globemaster III ] that the Pentagon says it doesn't want or need." She "opposed last-minute efforts to eliminate funding for the mammoth aircraft from the $626 billion Senate defense budget, which passed . . ."
"Secretary of Defense Robert Gates says the 205 aircraft currently in use or on order are plenty to do the job. President Barack Obama agrees. He didn't include funding for more of the planes in his budget proposal, and his former presidential rival, Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain, has been trying to eliminate the project for years. . . . The spending goes on. The beat goes on, and sometime the American people are going to say, `Enough.'"
Note that the C17 is not built in Arkansas and "zip" few parts for it are manufactured here. "According to Boeing, only five people directly employed by the aerospace giant work in Arkansas. The multi-billion dollar company makes just $6,723 in charitable contributions statewide, according to its own Web site." So, why would Lincoln and Pryor support spending $2.5 Billion over the objections of the Secretary of Defense and even President Barack Obama? Good question! The major person who gained was their California democrat colleague Ma'am Barbara [Disrespect Generals] Boxer who lives in the state where the planes are built.
Lincoln did not have to vote in favor of this wasteful spending, Did she expect or get some benefit or trade-off from Ma'am Boxer or from others. Since Sen Mark Pryor gets a pass in this November (but we will be watching Mark), let's ask Sen Blanche Lincoln to explain why she voted "to spend $2.5 billion we don't actually have on planes we don't actually need."
It is time that the wasteful spenders like Boxer, Lincoln, and Reid are held accountable at the ballot box. Our grandchildren are in debt another $2.5 billion for planes that neither the Air Force, nor the Pentagon, nor the Commander-in Chief wanted. And it it pains me to be giving Obama any credit for agreeing with the Pentagon and John McCain that we didn't need to spend this $2.5 BILLION for 10 more C17s. But then again, President Obama did not veto the bill. After all it was only "OPM" - "Other People's Money." And, Lincoln and her other elitist cronies might not even be around when the borrowed money has to be repaid.
How many other billions has Blanche Lincoln costs us? I recall that she and her fellow Democrats gave us even far worse: bailouts, Obamacare, stimulus bills, $13 Trillion dollar national debt and more. She is even position to potentially shift in the upcoming Lame Duck session to support Cap and Tax. Blanche - what were you thinking? Voting to waste $2.5 BILLION was Stinkin' Thinkin' - Mrs. Lincoln!
Tags: Blanche Lincoln, Stinkin Thinkin, C-17, wasteful spending, fraud, waste, abuse, national debt, bailouts, stimulus bills, Obamacare, Cap and tax To share or post to your site, click on "Post Link". Please mention / link to the ARRA News Service. Thanks!
Posted by Bill Smith at 9:37 PM - Post Link
1 Comments:
Colleagues:
Your observations are appreciated, and we trust the length or content of this response is not in violation of your clearly stated posting protocols. We nevertheless believe it is worth your and your readers consideration, if nothing more to add to one's knowledge base.
While Senator Lincoln's, among others, support of C-17 is laudable (and for some, lamentable) she is hardly a singular voice expressing profound objection to termination of this inarguably indispensable airlifter built by 702 suppliers in 43 states. Moreover, its production directly employs 30,000 workers, before one appropriately applies Keynesian economic multipliers as noted in a limited release 2005 Department of Commerce study measuring the full industrial base impact of line closure.
(http://www.pressreleasepoint.com/global-heavylift-holdings-llc-provides-copy-publicly-unavailable-dept-commerce-boeing-c17-industrial)
Boeing is to be commended for its continuing and bold support for C-17, despite the forces arrayed against them. And, as stated in July 17 and June 1, 2010 releases from Global HeavyLift, ( http://ow.ly/2cXvE http://www.slideshare.net/GHHLLC2/ghh-press-release-60110-updated-from-52610-52810-51410-docx3 ) every effort is being made by elements within the DoD, in collaboration with several international media outlets, both mainstream and in the blogosphere, to dissuade foreign governments, inclusive of India and its IAF, from continuing their efforts to acquire as many as 34 aircraft (of which at least 16 are for India) with the intent of addressing critical strategic/tactical airlift requirements. The latter being considered a necessary and pragmatic move as the China threat, acknowledged as quite significant within the Annual Report to Congress on China's military build-up ( http://ow.ly/2xstx ) finally released in mid-August roughly 5 months late by the DoD, grows.
Since so many editorials are containing C-17 catch phrases like 'unnecessary', 'not requested', 'The Air Force says 180 (or 205, now 223) is enough', one assumes that such assertions concerning this superlative airlifter which has no true near, mid or long term replacement, are fact checked to ascertain the worthiness of these comments.
Several press releases by GHH over the past year, note that the data to which the President, SECDEF, the SECAF and others have referred to as reasons for termination of C-17 production, have been debunked as based on flawed analytics and inapplicable, outdated, conflict assumptions by the GAO and Congress, or do not exist. GHH believes they can only be referring to the 2005/2006 Mobility Capabilities Study (MCS) produced by the Pentagon Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation (PA&E) and the Strategic airlift section of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) which echoes MCS conclusions that "180 C-17s augmented by 112 REAMP/RERP C-5s was[were] enough".
These same flawed conclusions have been repeated in the 2010 version of MCS (MCRS), despite DoD claims of "enhanced fidelity" within strategic/tactical airlift analytical matrices utilized.
Myron D. Stokes
Managing Member
Global HeavyLift Holdings, LLC
http://emotionreportscom.blogspot.com/
http://www.emotionreports.com
Encyclopedic Narrative: http://www.thefullwiki.org/Commercial_Application_of_Military_Airlift_Aircraft
2008 GAO Airlift Report http://www.slideshare.net/GHHLLC2/ghh-gao-airlift-reportd09501
From the GAO Report:
"Using DOD’s million ton-mile per day planning factors, we, working in collaboration with DOD, calculated that DOD would need to fully modernize 7 C-5s to attain the equivalent capability achieved from acquiring 1 additional C-17 and the costs would be over 3 times more (see table 3)."
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